Small
by Jane Penderwick
Summary: Just a childhood summer.
1. Chapter One

_I don't even know what this is but in this stifling southern summer heat I cannot muster the courage to finish up "A Penderwicks Christmas" so this is me passing the time. So let us divulge in a lazy childhood summer because I am, quite frankly, tired of writing teenage angst. Please tell me what you think, because I am trying out a more condensed style of writing, and, as you can probably tell from this rather lengthy intro, condensed writing isn't really my thing. This is set just one year after the third book and is NOT Skyffrey centric, though there will be some touches (not frequent though there is one in this chapter). I don't own the Penderwicks._

…

And so it goes.

…

Four girls were running through Quigley Wood, barefoot, and along a well-worn path. The air was cool and the pooling sunlight warm, and the breeze smelled rich and dark, like rotting leaves and soil and wet wood. The girls were all tall, slender (except maybe Batty who, at just six, still had some of her soft baby roundness), and really very _beautiful_ in a way that wasn't particularly trying to be beautiful, like the characters in the Alcott or Wilder novel.

There was a boy too, also racing through the wood but the opposite way, toward the girls. He had an army green book bag slung over one shoulder and spilling out of it was sheet music, leaving a trail of waltzes and marches and requiems like breadcrumbs.

The collision of the four girls and the very interesting boy was glorious.

…

Skye draws the dragons and then slays them in the backyard. But the blue crayon ran out and Hound ate the brown one and so now the dragon has green eyes and he is looking at her in a way that makes her forget to fight.

He smiles at her and she subtracts twenty three freckles. He smiles at her and she divides by three wrinkles at the corner of each eye. He smiles and she takes the square root of a left side dimple.

When it reduces no further she is left with just the parabola of his lips, just Jeffrey, but finds that it still has the same effect on her. Something cool and slippery in her gut.

She estimates that this is only time she has been stumped by problem, counting the time she attempted complex algebra at age six. And it infuriates her.


	2. Chapter Two

An aluminum coke can rattled against pavement and Batty kept her head down. A boy, about her age with red hair and shoes to match, popped his big league chew and kicked his can in her direction. It stopped its slow roll at her feet and she hummed Beethoven's Fifth in the same key as the metallic rattle of the can.

The boy stood in front of her and other boys came up behind him, all grinning like cats.

"You know 'batty' means 'crazy' or 'odd,' don't you?" he asked with a smile that guessed she did not, in fact, know.

"It does not."

"Does so. I looked it right up in my daddy's dictionary."

Batty dragged her toe along a crack in the sidewalk wishing the boy, Max, would go away.

"Your shoes are old."

Batty knew this. Her white sneakers were all frayed at the seams and the left sole was peeling away so now it slapped the pavement when she walked. Rosalind was taking her to buy new ones before the school year started again, but they didn't have the money together just yet.

"Mine are new, see?" He held up one sneaker proudly as he hopped around on the other foot. The shoe smelled strongly of rubber and plastic and was glaringly red. Fire engine red. Batty briefly considered yelling "fire" to get someone to save her from this boy but decided against it when she remembered Rosalind telling her years ago to never do such a thing. She attempted to walk around him.

He pushed her down on the sidewalk.

…

Batty kicked at shadows and took the long way home.

She wondered only briefly what it would be like to disappear and leave it all behind her, a trail of sounds and burning memories in her wake. She wondered if the sky would still be a sky without her and if the boy that pushed her would pick wild primroses in Quigley Wood and think her name. Wondered what the papers would read ["Young Girl Last Seen Walking through a Field of Pianos"]. Wondered how far she could go without feeling lonely.

…

Rosalind sat Batty up on the kitchen counter and put a Band-Aid with little music notes on it on her knee.

"Ok, I understand that you scraped you knee on the sidewalk, but _how_ exactly?" Rosalind asked, again.

Batty swung her legs a little, testing the Band-Aid, and said nothing.

"Batty."

"You can't tell Skye."

"Batty, tell me what happened," Rosalind said seriously, with eyebrows raised. Best not to keep promises that you can't keep.

Batty huffed stubbornly, sounding scarily like Skye. "A boy pushed me."


	3. Chapter Three

Jane was walking through Quigley Wood with her head in the clouds. She danced through the sunlight dripping down from the leaves above and jumped in the puddles it made on the forest floor. She pushed through cool leaves and stepped through spider webs that caught around her shoulders, forming a cape like gold when the sun struck it. She ventured further than ever before, lured by some unseen force into the deep woods past the burbling creek and along long stretches of stone walls and wild roses.

She found the treehouse on accident as she was spinning in slow circles and looking at the trees spin above her. The little house in the trees was peeking and Jane invited herself in, or rather, _up._

The rope later was old, and rather treacherously frayed, but Jane soldiered on. She pulled her torso through the opening in the floor of the treehouse and looked around, finding not the dusty and empty room she expected to but two big grey eyes looking back at her. Jane startled and reeled backward, but since she was still perched on the rope ladder, Jane stepped backward into empty air.

The next thing she knew, she was on the ground with a throbbing elbow and racing heart.

…

Skye was walking through Quigley Wood with purpose. There was a boy here, somewhere in the trees, and her sister was at home with an ice pack balanced in the curve of her arm as she attempted to use her hand to maneuver the TV remote and turn on afternoon soap operas, undoubtedly. Skye wiped a dribble of sweat away angrily and kicked her way through a thorny bramble.

Crushing loyalty.

That's what her sisters called it.

Skye kicked rocks at trees and mumbled curses at this grey eyed boy until she ran smack someone, around her age with curly brown hair.

"Oh I'm sorry," he said.

Skye caught her balance and looked up into grey eyes. There was a moment of realization, and then she punched him.


	4. Chapter Four

The boy opened his grey eyes to patches of blue sky peeking through swaying trees and blue eyes, panicked.

"I thought you were dead."

"So did I," the boy said, sitting up and holding his nose which was bleeding rather impressively.

Skye offered no sympathy. "You are the reason my sister nearly broke her elbow."

"Your… ah the girl that fell out of the treehouse? I surprised her on accident. She lost her footing and then ran away before I could help her."

Oh. _Oh._ Skye had thought that this was going to go better.

She huffed and then stuck out a hand, in what was perhaps the most reluctant show of peace the universe had ever witnessed, and pulled him to his feet.

"I guess you need an ice pack."

She wondered why she always seemed to meet people like this, fanning their faces after she collided with them. Why she seemed to always make rash decisions and take brash actions and collide with boys in tangled messes of limbs and hair, of apologies met with silence, of atoms on exploding atoms.

…

Rosalind sighed but didn't question the state of things when Skye sent a boy away with an ice pack to his nose and a curt word of parting. She found nothing too out of the usual with the scene anyway (it wasn't the first time). What concerned Rosalind more was the yelling from the backyard, heroic roars and shouts of "fire!" and the occasional "woof!"

She found no fire outside, much to her relief, but rather a childhood unfolding like a morning glory. Batty was pulling both Ben and Hound in her red wagon, shouting something about fire engines and grand rescues. Usually Hound was the one doing to pulling, but lately he seemed a bit too tired for such things, so he sat wagging lazily in the wagon as Batty pulled and Ben squirted plants without rhyme or reason other than boyish whim.

Rosalind smiled and watched as the sun burned another horizon away and childhood started to look like a short fuse to messy teenage years and messier adulthood. But these nights she turned a blind eye to it all and let it look simple... accidently on purpose forgot to count down the seconds to explosion, implosion, demolition, and let fire engine hearts continue to save the day for things that didn't need saving.


	5. Chapter Five

Jane hauled herself up into the treehouse the next day for the second time, this one as equally as ungraceful as the last. She sat up and looked around, this time finding exactly what she was expecting; a boy, who looked about her age with slate grey eyes opened wide with surprise.

"Sorry, did I scare you?" Jane asked. The boy had dark curly hair and a dark gray tee shirt that matched his eyes. Jane realized for the first time that he was holding a book in his hands, and for a brief moment, felt a powerful pang of guilt for ripping him away from his fantasy world (she knew the feeling of a parting too soon). As her eyes further adjusted, even more books emerged from the shadows, stacked in wonderfully precarious piles.

"It's ok, we are even now."

"I think my sister made sure of that." Jane eyed his nose carefully, scouring his face for tale tell signs of Skye.

The boy laughed. "It is fine, really. She is…"

"A fiercely loyal sister with a short temper that most often makes rash decisions and never makes a good first impression?"

"I was going to say nice. But I like your phrasing better." He laughed again, infectiously. "My name is Greyson, but everyone calls me Grey because of the eyes, see?" he opened his eyes wide and pointed to irises a striking slate gray.

Jane was reminded of Skye's speech of eyes color and a name to match and smiled at him lazily, lost in thought and dark curls.

"And your name is?"

"Oh me? I'm Jane. Just Jane. Plain Jane," she had to force herself to stop talking like a bumbling idiot with much effort.

He bowed his head in her direction with a new looking crossing his face, something histrionic and theatrically noble. "My lady"

Jane grinned and plopped down across from him. "Medieval"

"No Mrs. Jane, just in character." He grinned and held up a weathered copy of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

…

Jane took a match to everything she thought she knew.

Fiddled as it burned.

Took his hand and forgot to talk in the abstract.


	6. Chapter Six

_I am not sure how I feel about this one guys. It is not up to par with my usual work, but I have all of these fragments written up and saved on my computer so I suppose I'll keep posting what I have. Let me know what you think lovelies. _

…

Batty walked home with a girl from her class last year with soft blonde hair and a softly curved mouth. Her voice was soft too. In fact, just about everything about her friend was soft, comforting. Batty couldn't seem to find a label for what it was about her that made her chest swell. It wasn't a feeling exactly that filled Batty up, but it was two hands reaching out, no, a laugh like wind chimes, no, music in a deaf man's veins.

Or something terribly and wonderfully impossible such as that.

This girl was brave too, in her softness. She fell apart at the thought of boys stepping on ants other small critters and then stood in front of them without a tremor of fear. Broke at the idea of boys pushing Batty down and then walked her home.

Walking next to her, Batty felt safe. The girl next to her giggled at songbirds hopping through puddles, and Batty melted like butter, so soft in her brave.

…

They were running.

They were running in fading light and nothing else in the world seemed to matter.

Grey was laughing and she was shrieking to hear her voice dancing among the voices of the birds. Something about his dirty converses and calloused hand in hers made Jane's old soul feel young, like school girl crushes whispered in empty hallways and strawberry milk. They were running to her rock and Jane wasn't so sure about the magic you read in about in books anymore, the kind that makes you fly or talk to animals and such, but Jane thought that maybe magic existed that was a little more human than that. Like right then, as they leapt up onto her rock with the sun burning on the horizon their hands thrown up to the sky yelling to the gods and the wind, Jane had a feeling that these moments were charmed for sure.

She closed her eyes to feel it all under her skin.


	7. Chapter Seven

They played soccer in the empty lot down the street, knee deep in sweet grass and drowning in golden light, until they kicked the ball over the fence of the most feared resident of Gardam Street. They left it there, perched in the over grown weeds that surround the house and threatened to overtake the sagging porch.

They snuck out after dark, meeting in the street in front of the empty lot with flashlights and reckless hearts. Skye slipped under the chain link fence expertly, and Jeffrey followed a bit more clumsily with a distinct feeling that she had done this before. The got the ball from the shadows but got caught up in the moonlight and the dance of too tall weeds swaying and the lazy spinning waltz of stars overhead. They got the ball but got caught up in each other's stumbling words and stifled giggles that grew into outright laughter. Before they knew it, they were turning in circles right in time with the stars, their heads tilted back to catch comets on their tongues like snowflakes, and they were falling back in tall grass none too quietly, and definitely not with anything that resembled stealth. When the backdoor opened with a creak, they panicked and ran, bare feet quick through clover and flower bed, lanky limbs quick to fold in on themselves as them tumbled into the dirt and under the fence. They got hung up just once, when the belt loop of Jeffrey's pants got caught on the chain link and he had to kick them off to get free.

They ran the rest of the way home with Jeffrey in just boxer shorts, his pants torn at the waist and clutched in one hand. They stood in the front yard, doubled over to catch their breaths and his eyes twinkled like a thousand mischievous stars.

"I swear to every planetary body above Jeffrey Tifton," she said between gulps of air, "if you don't put your pants on…"

Inside, Skye told the whole story to Jane, who listened with eyes wide and laughing, talking excitedly about parallels and mockingbirds and tree knots and nonsense. Skye looked up at Jeffrey as she recanted the part where his pants got caught, and her eyes were gleaming like she was queen of the gypsies, a rebel heart, a cornerstone on the sidewalk of mischief. He laughed, cheeks blossoming pink, and her heart, usually roaring, purred. She was a lion heart and he was holding flaming hoops insisting that all wild things can be broken.

Skye wondered if it would be a crime to shoot down a boy that meant no harm.

…

Rosalind cornered Skye in the kitchen late that night, told her everything.

"She is being bullied?"

Rosalind nodded with sad eyes looking at Skye over the brim of her coffee cup.

Skye's eyes burned dark blue, fearsome enough to send the sun skittering, running scared across the sky. It was a familiar look, something like fury, something like well-intentioned stubbornness, and something that reminded Rosalind of broken glass, hurt and somehow more dangerous because of it. Skye's fists balled at her side, and Rosalind put a hand on her shoulder.

"You can't beat up a six year old."

"Wanna bet?" It came out in a growl.

"Skye."

"_Fine."_

…

Batty thought about the first thing she had ever killed. A flower on the vine is somehow so much prettier than the same folded, paper thin flower wilting on your nightstand.

The second thing. A firefly that she tried so very hard to hold onto and instead accidentally crushed, its small firefly sun spilling out onto her palm. She still swore that on the darkest nights, her palm glowed.

The third.

The walk home from her meeting with the boy up the street got her thinking about how nice it would be to become invisible. She looked down to where her scraped knee caps ought to be but in the dark, she could not see a thing.

Perhaps she had thought herself into a ghost.

…

_The first bit is an allusion to __To Kill a Mockingbird__ which I adore._


	8. Chapter Eight

_And… chapter eight! The chapters are getting progressively longer but I can't help it. I am busy writing college essays at the moment (cause I am getting old) so thank you guys for being patient with the sporadic updates._

…

Grey explained that he was staying with his grandmother who lived in the house behind the Penderwicks for a bit as they climbed the steep steps to his grandmother's attic. Jane didn't ask why but realized for the first time that, like all things (like golden sunsets and blue summers), he will inevitably slip away and leave a soft ache behind her ribs. She tried not to think about this as they took dusty old photographs down from the shelf, fading like memories do around the edges.

"Who are they?" Jane asked.

Grey removed the top picture, particularly faded and worn, of a young couple twisted around each other and laughing. "They are old family and friends, most of whom I never met. That's my mother…" he pointed to the woman in the frame and then let his finger come to a rest on the chest of the man next to her, lightly, like he was scared to press down too hard. "And that, that's…" He couldn't seem to finish and his words trailed away in the dust and dim light. Jane let them go. Not all words are meant to be said.

She held his hand.

"My mother died when I was six."

She wasn't sure why she said it, but Grey nodded and squeezed her fingers a bit tighter.

The people in the photographs seemed to have their lives just so, the women in ruby red lipstick and sweet talcum and the men in pressed collars, caught in perpetual smiles at the camera. Of course nothing is as it seems, and old photographs manage to mask the joyous riot and raggedy madness of life. They sat in the attic until it grew dark and made up stories for each of the ghosts in the photos, sending spirits rambling and haunting.

Grey walked her home through the gardens, and Jane was away with the fairies; dancing through the dewy grass, delicately folded wings behind her, a crown of thorns upon her head. He was quoting Cummings and Whitman and his slate grey eyes were shining like they were full moons.

His fingers found hers and Jane was singing to the body roaring in the silent summer night.

"Grey," his name was a sigh, melting like sugar on her tongue.

There were three moons out, and Jane had space on the mind and no gravity to hold her down.

…

Someone was shaking Jeffrey's shoulder and whispering his name. He groaned and rolled over, keeping his eyes firmly shut, refusing to give into the girl so brashly waking him from his sleep. She was so much gentler in his dreams. There was silence for a long moment and Jeffrey's consciousness was slowly slipping away once again when…

Jeffrey was shoved unceremoniously off the bed and he landed on the old hardwood floor with a rush of air leaving his lungs. Before he could even groan her name in an accusatory fashion, Skye had him hauled to his feet and had his face pressed up to the window overlooking the backyard.

"Come on lazy, this is urgent." Skye handed him a pair of binoculars (Skye had several pairs) and pointed them towards the back fence, where Jane stood in the moonlight rather close to boy that she was talking fast to, with a huge smile.

"Oh, Skye. Can't we just leave it alone? She looks so happy."

"Right that's the bad part," Skye said, and realizing how this sounded, quickly amended. "I mean not that she is happy, but that he is the source of her happy."

Jeffrey sighed. She was gentler in his dreams, but he supposed he wouldn't have it any other way.

…

Elbow bumps elbow. Wooden floorboards creak when reckless hearts slip in too late. The moon rebels against the sun and stays up past its bedtime. Knee caps all look the same when you are kneeling like spies behind the door, except hers are more scared than his.

Late summer nights are in full swing like a brass band of crickets, Batty thinks, and from the audience she watches her sisters spinning in the play that is life that is older than Shakespeare himself, fighting battles that are thousands of years old.

Shoulder bumps shoulder, and the world shivers.

Batty can feel the cold seep through the cracks in the cedar, autumn in stocking feet here to steal summer's thrill. The season is falling to another, loving, dying, and Batty shivers.


	9. Chapter Nine

Batty was in the backyard as Skye attempted to teach her the art of self-defense and Jeffrey watched from the porch, insisting that music was a far more noble pursuit. Batty secretly agreed with him, but Skye seemed so determined, so she held her fists up like Skye had showed her and swung them valiantly.

Hound watched on and over his favorite little girl, swinging tiny fists with eyes closed. He did that a lot these days- watched and wagged lazily instead of joining in. Daddy said it was because Hound was "getting old" but Batty didn't believe such nonsense. What she didn't notice was time slipping away like a thin fox as she ran through the backyard after her sisters. That the fur on his nuzzle had greyed like an old photograph around the edges.

The leaves were starting to turn color and Batty forgot to watch.

…

Rosalind kicked leaves rattling like bones on the pavement in a cool breeze that made her think of cooler days to come. The tap tap of leaves to asphalt. The

tap

tap

of a heart beating fast.

Tommy doesn't look at her when he talks and something about the way he traces the cracks in the tiled floor makes her shiver.

"Tommy?"

"I can't. I have football." He takes the ball out from where it was tucked under his arm and holds

it up weakly.

"You always have football."

Something about the way he says nothing makes her feel like she might be sick, and violently so.

…

Batty had a plan.

She walked down the street, her small hands in fists at her side. She heard the familiar metallic rattle and marched toward it, a tiny doll marching into battle. His friends weren't around today and it was just him, kicking the can repeatedly into the curb.

When he saw Batty he grinned, shoved his hands into his pockets and sauntered over, a wad of pink bubble gum in his cheek.

Batty looked down at the cracks in the sidewalk like cracks in her heart and saw, poking through the dirt that had settled there, a tiny green shoot reaching for the sun. Batty thought it was important.

Red sneakers came to a squeaky stop in front of her. Batty looked up at the boy and squinted her eyes in a way that she hoped was threatening.

"I do not appreciate being pushed on the ground," she said, holding up her knee to show the great misdeed he had done her. She immediately wished she had picked a Band-Aid that was slightly tougher in its design.

He looked down at her knee and then up at her face with an odd look and a furred brow. "Stay still."

Batty was not expecting him to say anything along these lines and, caught off guard, she froze where she was standing. The boy took a step closer to her and she brought her fists up to defend herself and closed her eyes. But what came was not another push to the pavement but a kiss on her cheek, feather light and as shy as the dark side of the moon.

And then he was gone. The boy with the fire engine red kicks and pink bubble gum was gone as quickly as he had come, and Batty was left wondering how exactly the situation got away from her so quickly.


	10. Chapter Ten

When things fall apart.

…

Young hearts beat a bit faster when thrown together. Skye is pretty sure this is scientifically proven, but then again, biology was never her thing.

They spray Nick Greiger with a garden hose and hide in the crawl space below the house. The soles of his shoes are pressed against the soles of hers and they're both laughing in the same key.

She is a fickle heart and he is celestial skies, steady as stars in the woods.

Her soles are pressed against his.

Her soul is pressed against his and it's the beginning of everything.

…

They were sitting in the garden behind the rose bushes. Crouching in low weeds at dusk.

She leans forward and places her palm against Batty's chest. Batty felt her heart pressing back.

"Did you feel it here? When he kissed you?" she asks.

Batty shakes her head.

Batty wonders how the other girl's eyes could be so impossibly deep and wide. They didn't know it yet but they were asking big questions. They asked _can't you see it… us dancing? _And they looked like kisses stolen on tiptoes straddling sidewalk cracks at seventeen. They asked _do you feel it here? When I touch you now? _They looked like perhaps and just maybe, in time (when they grow into their wolf hearts and their bodies are not all skinned knees and spindly arms).

Batty leans back on her hands, still muddied from making mud pies in the sun.

_Yes._

…

Rosalind was never one to be compared to violent things like summer storms and natural disasters, because Skye usually had the cornerstone on those metaphors. But that night Rosalind swept into the dimly lit kitchen a hurricane of a girl; heart like thunder and lips like lightning licking, burning, twisting white hot around his name.

Rosalind slammed the door behind her and Skye, who had been sitting in a pool of lamplight at the kitchen table doing math, startled and froze. Rosalind had one hand knotted in her hair and the other outstretched, reaching for anything that would break that was not her heart. She found the plates drying on the counter first, snatched one up and whirled around to face Skye where she sat paralyzed over parabolas.

Their gazes caught for a second that seemed to hold its breath, Skye's azure eyes wide with what was not fear precisely, but shock, and Rosalind's eyes smoldering like a midnight cigarette. There was something else there too, in the honey brown of her irises. Something that wasn't angry at all. No, this something was a dear in headlights, the moment before the fall, a young girl listening to her mother's EKG go from soft pulses to one flat buzz (she was too young).

The plate breaks.  
Rebuild.

Wrecking Ball.  
Rebuild.

Flatline.  
Rebuild.

Door shuts.  
She walks away.

And then Skye is there, holding her wrists and twisting her arms around her sister before Rosalind could smash the rest of their dishware.

Eyes like rainclouds drizzled his name and it made for a muddy mess. Rosalind jumped in every puddle.

Skye lowered them both to the floor and held Rosalind tight around the middle like she could hold her together.


End file.
